A proper restaurant will have salt and paper and maybe either a pat of butter for your bread - or a saucer of olive oil if it has continental pretensions.
Cafes may have salt, pepper, ketchup, brown sauce, brown vinegar, sugar, sweetener.
In pubs and restaurants, items brought to your table on request could be mustard (typically ‘english’, ‘french’ and ‘dijon’), mint sauce (for lamb), horseradish sauce (for roast beef), apple sauce (pork) or tartare sauce (fish). Pubs often have these things in sachets.
In Fort Worth, the greasy spoon diners will have a bottle of pepper sauce on the table, but none of the Mexican/TexMex places will. Instead, diners will sit down to a table with salt, pepper, and the various sweeteners. Shortly afterwards, someone will swing by with a basket of tortilla chips for the table and a bowl of salsa for each diner. This is in EVERY Mexican/TexMex restaurant that I’ve been to, whether it’s a chain or a single location.
In Bulgaria, you’ll get sunflower oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. This is because a very, very, very standard light meal (as an appetizer before a real meal, or as something to nosh on while you’re having a glass of rakia or cognac with friends) is shopska salata, which doesn’t come with a dressing. So you need a bit of oil and vinegar and spices to get it to its optimal flavoring. This is pretty common everywhere in the Balkans, as far as I can tell.
If you get pizza or fries, you’ll be asked if you want ketchup or mayo. Whose idea it was to put ketchup and mayo on pizza, I don’t know, but they’re stupid. At least in Bulgaria, they ask. I once had pizza in Bosnia and they ketchupified it without my permission. (I was starving so I ate it anyway.)
I just clicked that link and man, except for the onions, that’s about a perfect salad. And yeah, that’s the perfect dressing. I’d probably want red wine vinegar, but regular vinegar would be OK too.
It is a good salad. I was just thinking of making one, too. Except I’d need some sirene and getting it is a bit of a pain. (Not impossible, just that the only place in town that has it is out of my way.)
Plenty of local places serve fried catfish (or oysters or shrimp) and french fries … but no malt vinegar. “Fish & chips”, by that name, are unknown around here (except as a Britishism) – the “fried seafood platter” is the cultural analog.
Depends on which restaurant you go to. They all have each, but some are automatically at the table, and the rest you have to ask for. Soy sauce at asian places, mustard/malt vinegar and european places, tabasco/cholulla at hisanic places. (for those of you who don’t know, tabasco and cholulla are both hot sauces, but each from different regions of mexico and thus have slightly different ingredients/flavors.)
Noodle soup is the very popular noon-time meal in Thailand, and noodle soup stands always have a 4-jar frame, presenting four condiments:
[ul][li]Sweet - sugar[/li][li]Piquant - crushed dried very hot chili peppers[/li][li]Sour - vinegar mixed with chili pepper[/li][li]Salty - salted fish sauce (fermented anchovy or some such)[/li][/ul]
I didn’t say it was made there. They are regional styles. You can buy guinness here in the states, but it isn’t made or bottled in ireland. It’s bottled in the US. It’s still Guinness.
It’s not quite a 1:1 analogy, but you get the idea. Both are hot sauces, one recipe originated in the state of Tabasco, the other in the state of Cholulla. They are both made differently and the difference in taste is quite distinct. And some american fellas decided to market their own hot sauces, based on existing regional recipes.
And these are just condiments. There are many regional cooking styles of mexican food, each (though having some similarities) are quite distinct from one another.
And no, taco bell and similar is not mexican food. It is tex-mex, distinct to the texas region and quite apart from proper mexican food. It’s alway bugged me. I do love nachos and enchiladas etc, but it’s not really mexican. You try that stuff in Guadalajara or Mexico City it tastes terrible! It’s border-towns that have the best tex-mex IMHO.
Tabasco sauce’s entire history takes place in Louisiana. I can’t even find evidence that McIlhenny’s Tabasco sauce is based on any kind of foodstuff native to the state of Tabasco, Mexico. Tabasco peppers are native to Louisiana, and have only been grown in other countries for a few decades.
Sriracha seems to becoming quite common at any Asian place around here.
Re: Tabasco. It seems that at anything nicer than a Denny’s-style diner, Tabasco is skipped for some other kind of hot sauce, often Cholula. It’s almost as if Tabasco is coming to be seen as “low class.” I’m not sure why, there’s nothing wrong with Tabasco.
Edmund McIlhenny developed the recipe for Tabasco Sauce all by himself. I don’t think he had even been to Mexico. So the above is flat wrong. And most of the hot sauces being developed and marketed in North America in the last few decades are from home-grown recipes as well. Blair’s Mega-Death Sauce isn’t regional to anyplace but maybe the Southern Marches of Hell.
Okay, I know what dijon mustard is. Other than that the ‘default’ mustards in America seem to be german/deli (coarse grained brown) and French’s (yellow with tons of turmeric.) Do those match up with your english and lower-cased ‘french’?
Down home in redneck country you have salt, pepper, the assorted sweeteners plus a large sugar shaker with raw rice grains to keep it from sticking together, and the little bottle of green hot peppers covered with vinegar that you shake the vinegar over stuff. (Possibly the most run-on sentence I’ve ever written.)
